All Westerners are stalwart (and other tall tales)

Western humor is all
about adversity, braving the elements, surviving the landscape and
stretching the truth. Call it polished prevarication. Not lies,
exactly; more like embellishments. Stories that should be true,
even if they’re not.

Pioneers came West, and over
time each group told its own jokes -- cowboys, loggers, Lycra-clad
bicyclists – and everyone learned to laugh at each other and
maybe even at themselves. Miners loved playing practical jokes and
thought nothing of placing packrats in each other’s lunch
pails. Cowboys always joked with each other but especially loved
tricking tenderfeet flatlanders. A Wyoming cowboy would fix a
logging chain to a fence post and claim it was a windsock, which
just might be true in the Cowboy State, where the annual Wyoming
Wind Festival lasts from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31. Even children got into
the act.

One very young wrangler took his city cousin on
a high country hike. When they saw some deer run off and found
brown pellets along the trail, he told his cousin, “Looky
there, those are smart pills.” The cousin was skeptical and
said, “How do you know?” The little cowboy just smiled
and said, “Try one.” So the city cousin picked one up,
put it in his mouth and began to chew. He spit it out and said,
“My gawd, that tastes like deer poop.” The boy doubled
up laughing and said, “See? You’re smarter
already.”

Western politicians thought nothing of
stretching the truth. William Gilpin, Colorado’s first
governor, described western Colorado as a fertile area where
“agriculture was effortless, no forests needed clearing,
manual labor was not required . . . and to arrange fields for
irrigation was no more trouble than fencing.” That sounds as
sincere as the sales catalog that sold patented postholes to make
it easier to fence your place.

The master of 19th century
Western humor was Mark Twain, who traveled to Virginia City, Nev.,
and took a job on a local newspaper where he learned not to offend
his readers. In his classic book Roughing It, Twain advised against
getting into pistol duels because “the thin atmosphere seemed
to carry healing to gunshot wounds, and therefore to simply shoot
your adversary through both lungs was a thing not likely to afford
you any permanent satisfaction, for he would be looking for you
within the month, and not with an opera glass, either.” Twain
made his reputation with the “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras
County,” but the West has done him one better with our own
indigenous animals.

Jackalopes immediately come to mind,
but after an endless winter like this one you might also see the
wampus kitty, which secretly opens barn doors and ranch gates and
always leaves them open. There’s also the sidehill gouger. It
looks similar to a mountain lion, but a leg in front and a leg in
back are longer than the other pair so in deep snow it easily
straddles steep slopes. It doesn’t do well in a straight
line, but the sidehill gouger moves fast around mountains.

Then there’s the fur-bearing trout. History
professor Tom Noel at the University of Colorado, Denver, says that
“the legendary fur-bearing trout dates from the earliest days
of the gold rush. Shaggy miners used bear grease to slick down
their heads and beards, then sat too close to the fire, burning
their greasy hair. When a hair-tonic salesman came up to the hills
from Denver, he carried the tonic in five-gallon glass jugs on a
mule train. The lead mule slipped and all 100 jugs went into the
creek. Trout ingested the tonic and grew hair. These fur-bearing
trout thrived in Colorado's chilly streams and may be seen to this
day.”

As for me, I’m on the lookout for the
Bucky-Jack-a-Pheas, which has the horns of a small buck deer, the
body of a jackrabbit and the rear end and tail feathers of a South
Dakota pheasant. This rare, endangered species is a distant cousin
to the more common jackalope, star of a thousand postcards, which
combines a jackrabbit with an antelope’s antlers. The
“Bucky” stirs itself only at night and can be found at
elevations between 10,440 and 10,450 feet where it is always
looking for a mate.

So, yes, Western humor is full of
boosterisms, exaggerations, lies and damned lies, but what else is
new? It’s an election year. Get used to it.

Andrew Gulliford is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is professor of Southwest Studies and History at Fort Lewis College in Durango,
Colorado.